On the Southern Literary Trail discussion

Here's a place to list these books, so we can keep count. This comes under the heading of useless but interesting information.

The Weight of Blood
Cross Creek
One Foot in Eden

Love it! Am on my phone so I cannot put the link but another one was:
"The World Made Straight" (also by Ron Rash)

Here is another odd saying I recently saw - calling a woman of somewhat poor repute a "dirty leg." My husband, from north Mississippi, is the only person I've ever heard use this phrase until we both bumped into it in The Next Step in the Dance by Tim Gautreaux.

Ozark Magic and Folklore

My mother's phrase, in lieu of any strong language, was "Wouldn't that jar your grandmother's peaches."

Since I worked primarily with the elderly, I occasionally would ask one of my patients if they had ever heard that expression. I did meet one person and they had a Canadian background similar to my Mom's I believe though I don't remember if it was the same province. (and I think something other than peaches were jarred :))

oops....I thought this was a spot for odds and ends of phrases. Didn't realize it was supposed to be book titles. Oh well.

Sue wrote: "oops....I thought this was a spot for odds and ends of phrases. Didn't realize it was supposed to be book titles. Oh well."

Seems like there's room here for both.

Thanks Tom :)

It's officially changed now. Any old country sayings or practices are fodder.

Diane wrote: "It's officially changed now. Any old country sayings or practices are fodder."

That's how you swing a one-eyed cat!

Sue wrote: "My mother's phrase, in lieu of any strong language, was "Wouldn't that jar your grandmother's peaches."

My grandmother used to say, Well, doesn't that just jar your pickles.

Tom wrote: "Diane wrote: "It's officially changed now. Any old country sayings or practices are fodder."

That's how you swing a one-eyed cat!"

Debbie wrote: "Sue wrote: "My mother's phrase, in lieu of any strong language, was "Wouldn't that jar your grandmother's peaches."

My grandmother used to say, Well, doesn't that just jar your pickles."

That's really close. Amazing how creative folks would get to avoid cursing!

go get me that chingadera

and then, Go pound sand

John wrote: "go get me that chingadera

and then, Go pound sand"

Don't let your mama hear you saying that south of the border.

Found another snake, Diane!!
Page 110, "Burning Bright and Other Stories" by our man Ron Rash. It is actually in the title story itself...

"The road forked and as Marcie passed Holcombe Pruitt's place she saw a black snake draped over a barbed-wire fence, put there because the older farmers believed it would bring rain. Her father had called it a silly superstition when she was a child, but during a drought nearly as bad as this one, her father had killed a black snake himself and placed it on a fence, then follow him to his knees and his scorched cornfield, imploring whatever entity would listen to bring rain."

**then fallen to his knees (Siri cannot understand Southern)

LeAnne wrote: "**then fallen to his knees (Siri cannot understand Southern)"

this gave me a good chuckle

;)

Diane, you are officially in the House of Slytherin!

Ok, I accept that. And all this time y'all thought I was nice!

Because you are ssssssssssssneaky!

Sneaky Southern Slytherin. Say that 5 times in a row.

Ha!!!

You can be a member of Gryffindor and still speak Parseltongue, as Harry Potter. ;-)

So, can we add SNAKE HANDLING to the list? For some reason, nothing can make a character any creepier than this can for me. On my list, I have:
The Little Friend
A Feast of Snakes
A Land More Kind Than Home
The Plague of Doves

There is one I'm missing...whaddya got, Diane??

One or more of the Fever Devlin books has snake handling in them. Author is Philip DePoy. I adore them!

Oooo, Kim! Don't you just love FREAKY? I gotta check your author out.

What about Little Sister Death? I remember the moccasin who was afraid of that unholy rabbit and of course all the copperheads, but did somebody way back handle them?

"The Devil's Dream" by Lee Smith is about a snake handling sect in the NC mountains. On a more personal note, my grandmother was a Primitive Baptist, and we loved to go to church with her on Saturday night to watch Reverend Bunn handle snakes, and some of the members spoke in tongues and danced and writhed all over the place. There was also a band. It was lively all right, and quite a show for us kids.

He's got s couple of series. Fever Devlin is a professor from the mountains in Georgia, all kinds of quirky in his background. Then the Easy books feature a Zen Southern detective.

Diane. That is the coolest thing Ive heard all day. You have seen this stuff!!!

LeAnne wrote: "Diane. That is the coolest thing Ive heard all day. You have seen this stuff!!!"
I love Donna Tartt's The Little Friend--great writing. But there's an interesting book (non-Fiction) by Dennis Covington. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1.... It's set in Scottsboro, Al where I used to live.

Kaye, the book looks like it has some strange facts in it! Creepy.

Yes, it does. Truth IS often stranger than fiction, isn't it? :)

I just got invited to participate in an author interview via Goodreads (written submissions) for Louise Erdrich, and it reminded me about one of her characters - a woman named Marn who marries a con man/religious guy that ends up building a cult.

If you have read any of Erdrich's books, you know they are set in the Dakotas and involve characters who are descendants of native Americans. Her stories are not southern lit, but this one character meets some southerners while her husband travels his tent circuit (prior to the cult). They are snake handlers, and by golly - Marn ends up taking two snakes home with her! The book is kind of a collection of interlaced stories (although the blurb doesn't tell you that, so it seems disjointed) called The Plague of Doves. It is not the author's best effort, but I LOVED the sections about Marn and her hubby Billy Peace.

Anyway, it got me thinking - what other works of literature (or just dumb fiction) use snakes as some kind of creep-out factor or symbology? Here in the land of southern literature, it would seem our group would have a handle on that, but if a regional North Dakota author includes them, where else are they? I am not some kind of snake nut, but I don't have a phobia of them in real life, either. We seem to have a natural aversion to them, and it is pretty clever of authors to leverage that.

I built a Goodreads list to capture those titles. I'm not so interested in the non-fiction aspects of it, but how authors use the device to show how primitive, local beliefs still crop up during times of desperation or just to freak the reader out.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/9...

Interesting, LeAnne. Shall check it out. One of the snake stories I remember from my family is my dad's weird summer job when he was at Ohio State. He got hired to blow up rattlesnake & copperhead nests through the mountains of West Virginia so the phone company men could run lines through in relative comfort & safety. One assumes they either had been getting snake bitten, or were freaked out by them. In the course of his job, Dad got bitten by a copperhead...quieter than the rattlesnakes,?although they smell like rotten eggs/sulphur which is somewhat of a warning. He used to show us the bite mark on his ankle, said he never was so sick in his life.

Holy snake bite, Kim! You have got to get your pop to read Serena. The timber workers in their early 30s or getting bitten, but they used a very bizarre method to get rid of the snakes. I knew a gal who got bitten by a copperhead while just out walking her dog in a North Louisiana subdivision. She was put in the hospital for a few days, but they declined to give her the anti-venom because the side effects of it were nearly as bad as the snake venom itself. The bite was on her ankle but her leg swelled up enormously all the way to her buttocks.

I would love to pass on the book recommendation, but my Dad passed some years ago. He was a real character, knew Civil War history inside and out, was a great story teller, journalist, sports writer, sportscaster, and columnist. Towards the end of his life he did a radio show called "A Time for Reminiscing" in which he told stories, read poetry, and played big band music. I can still hear his voice doing the opening of the show based on the lines from the Book of Eccliastes in the Bible, "There is a time to be born, a time to die, " and so on. He was bigger than life in many ways, always singing and dancing, laughing and arguing, swearing fit to peel paint off the walls--he used words and phrases that were not common until I saw a stand-up comedy routine--and would be reeling of Byron's "She walks in beauty" in the next breath. He snored so loudly the neighbors could hear him up on the street that passed the house even though the house was set way back from the street and their bedroom was in the back. My mom became a lifelong reader combatting his snoring, she would read until exhausted enough to sleep through it. Never a dull moment around him, I will say.

You are the luckiest daughter ever. Im sure he is smiling down, knowing you're telling tales on him <3